The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventor(s), to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Data is typically stored in primary storage devices such as large capacity disk drives. Primary storage devices are generally slow relative to other forms of storage (e.g., RAM) and thus have high latencies for accessing the stored data. One mechanism for reducing the access time to retrieve data is to use a cache. For example, when the data is part of a shared file system and is accessed over a network connection, caching the data locally at a host can reduce latency when accessing the data. However, when the data is part of the shared file system inconsistencies in the data can arise when two hosts cache the same data and independently alter the data. Accordingly, difficulties may arise when hosts cache data from a shared network storage.